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Let me be very clear, when I talk about “hacking” SEO, I’m
talking about saving time and doing things as efficiently as
possible. I’d never encourage gray or black hat techniques in an
effort to game the search engines!

So with that in mind, let’s look at a few ways to speed up the
process of performing proper SEO on your site. SEO rules must be
followed closely, but that doesn’t mean that you need to waste
time doing things the hard way. The following five hacks will cut
back the amount of time you have to spend on SEO, while
simultaneously improving your natural search performance:

Hack 1: Get keyword ideas from your internal search
data. When people search inside your site using your
search bar, they’re doing so because the content they’re looking
for isn’t immediately apparent. By tracking these searches,
you’ve got a supply of fresh new keywords that you already know
your customers are interested in. Building content around them
automatically pays off in terms of SEO, as you’re helping to
satisfy both visitors and the search engines.

The analytics programs of some websites will automatically return
this data, but if you have a Wordpress site that doesn’t, take a
look at the Search Meter plugin. It’s free to install
and will automatically help you uncover the most popular
search terms from within your very own website.

Hack 2: Find keyword suggestions using the Google Adwords
Keyword Planner. Since most Google Analytics data has
turned into “not provided,” you’ve got to get a bit
more clever when it comes to getting keyword information from
the search giant.

Log into the new Google Adwords Keyword Planner and select the
“Search for keyword and ad group ideas” option. Then, enter your
site’s URL into the “Your landing page” field, set the targeting
option to your country and run your search. The “Keyword ideas”
tab that appears will give you a series of phrases Google
believes to be related to your site -- all powerful options to
target with onsite SEO and content campaigns if you aren’t
already.

Hack 3: Add Google Authorship code to your site’s
header. There are a few different ways that you can set
up and claim Google Authorship (which you really should do for SEO
purposes), but the easiest has to be the following:

If you have a Wordpress site, don’t worry about plugins or email
confirmations. Instead, simply plug the following code into the
header.php file of your site (making sure to replace the profile
link with your own code):

Doing so ensures that your profile code will be propagated to all
pages of your site – right where Google can find it and give you
credit for your efforts.

Hack 4: Submit entire domains to the Disavow Links
tool. When the Disavow Links tool first came out, SEOs
were super cautious about submitting individual links only.
Certainly, it made sense to be cautious before it was known
exactly what impact the tool would have on a site’s performance.
If the tool immediately devalued any links submitted, cutting off
an entire domain could have an unnecessarily widespread impact --
taking down good links, as well as bad.

However, in a June 2013 video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of
webspam, made it clear that webmasters didn’t need to be too
picky about the links they submitted using the tool. Instead
of submitting individual links, Cutts recommended submitting
entire URLs -- saving tons of time for formerly nitpicky SEOs.

If a backlink analysis of your site’s inbound links reveals a few
negative issues (perhaps, a series of articles submitted to link
farm networks back when this technique carried SEO weight), don’t
worry about being selective in your disavowal request. Submitting
entire domains is a good SEO practice, and it’s a good time-saver
as well.

Hack 5: Combine Javascript tags with Google Tag
Manager. Google Analytics, Twitter and Google+ are just
a few of the sites that request to install JavaScript code on
your site in order to power certain functionalities. But
unfortunately, every one of these snippets that you install slows
down your site -- and it’s well-known that slow sites are bad for
SEO.

To save the time of requiring your site to fire each snippet
individually, take a look at Google’s free Tag Manager tool. Simply enter your code
pieces into the tool’s tag generator and you’ll be provided
with a site-wide tag that will fire each individual JavaScript
file according to the rules you specify. Once this tag is
installed on your site, you’ll see load times decrease
immediately compared to your initial on-page configuration.